Cancel culture in universities, again?

In a recent meeting reported in The Australian, the ANU’s Vice-Chancellor Rebekah Brown said students were finding it “really hard to challenge ideas without fear of judgment;” because of “cancel culture.”

But, Western Sydney University Vice Chancellor George Williams observes that “culture wars have long been a hallmark of education systems around the world.” He gives a thoughtful assessment of this, and the other challenges facing Australia’s universities,  in his new essay ‘Aiming Higher’.

Williams affirms that “Universities should be places of disagreement and challenge at the vanguard of societal battles over freedom of speech, while ensuring zero tolerance for anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate speech”.

This echoes Prof. Brown’s assessment that “while respectful contestation should be a great strength of our academic institution, it’s actually one of the greatest challenges that we need to be thinking about”.

In other words, rigorous debate over ideas should be welcome in universities. An idea that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny should be discredited. If, for instance, somebody claims that colonialism in Australia was a benign project, but fails to account for the well-documented massacres by the colonists, that claim should be countered with the evidence. That’s the point of university learning.